in Gaza
is becoming
another chapter
of human shame
in the global
history books
This week the United Nations issued one of its most
urgent warnings yet about the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In what most
are describing as “the cruellest phase” of this bitter and grinding war of
attrition, some 9,000 truckloads of vital aid currently remain stuck at the
border, whilst the entire population of Gaza – around 1.2 million people – are
now at material risk of famine. It is also believed that some 14,000 babies are
at risk of death because their starving mothers cannot breastfeed them, and
vital flour supplies to make bread are on the point of running out. Evacuation
orders have already been issued for the few remaining areas of Gaza not already
obliterated by missile fire, and most people are now living out on the streets.
Whilst the present unfolding horror has been created
by Israel’s decision to annihilate the Gazan population after the Hamas attacks
of 7th October, 2023, there was already a preexisting fragility to the Gaza
strip that had everyone warning that harsh military action would lead quickly
to a humanitarian crisis. At the time of the October attack it was estimated
that more than 60% of Gaza’s population was already dangerously food insecure,
and onerous food blockades had already become a fact of life. Way back in 2006,
when asked about Israel’s systematic and sustained blocking of essential food
supplies into Gaza, Israeli government adviser Dov Weisglass was widely quoted
as having said: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make
them die of hunger.”
Since Israel retaliated in October 2023, the
systematic and relentless destruction of homes, food factories, bakeries,
grocery stores and the general infrastructure that would have allowed people to
feed themselves has done exactly that – Medecins Sans Frontiers has estimated
that 53,000 Palestinians have died and some 120,000 have been seriously injured
in the conflict. At a strategic and self-sufficiency level food sovereignty is
now entirely in the hands of the Israelis – even Gazan fishermen have been shot
regularly by Israeli gunboats when they’ve stayed into unauthorised waters
where the fish swim most readily; most Gazan livestock has been killed,
agricultural land has been rendered unusable by the war and less than one third
of agricultural wells are functional.
The rest of the world has been fully aware of this
genocide for a long time now, but has been largely happy to allow the Israelis
to press on, because of a toxic combination of the need to support a powerful
ally, and a dark subscript of wanting a terrorist organisation and its
supporting culture removed. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has
pointed out just this week, he is only now being pressured into easing the
total blockade because Israel’s allies cannot tolerate “images of mass famine.”
From the moment the first shot was fired on 7th October
as some 6,000 heavily-armed Gazans poured across the Gaza-Israel border intent
on killing as many people as possible, the Israeli government has committed
itself to nothing short of the annihilation of the Palestinian population. It
sees this as the only sure mechanism for putting an end to years of terrorism
and random brutal attacks on its population, with an additional benefit that
the plantation of the much-contested Gaza strip will bring this valuable
territory back under Israeli control. For Israel, decades of dialogue and
negotiation have proven fruitless and have done nothing to slow the killings on
both side; for much of the outside world the Gaza conflict seemed until
recently just like another civil war, thankfully taking place in someone else’s
back yard.
We may never know quite what Hamas had in mind when it
launched its suicidal assault on its far more powerful and ruthless neighbour,
but the depraved depths of the atrocities committed were only ever going to
extract one response.
Ironically, whilst the world becomes increasingly
frantic in its condemnations of what’s going on in Gaza right now, it’s a
pitiful reality that this is actually the consequence of most wars – landscapes
get devastated, cities get turned to dust and populations tend to starve in the
streets. This is ever the price we all have to pay for our human failure to
talk, and to reach peaceful compromises over our differences.
The blockading of vital food supplies into Gaza has
been the focus of humanitarian concerns this week, especially when the aid has
been given willingly and sits trapped at the Gazan border. The use of
starvation as a weapon of war is strictly forbidden under the Geneva
conventions and starvation has been condemned by U.N. Resolution 2417 – which
calls on all parties involved in conflict to allow food and basic necessities
to flow freely into its civilian populations. Such aspirations are fine words
penned in far flung auditoriums, but the reality of war is the defeat of an
opponent is not going to be prosecuted by giving them sustained access to
essential supplies, and who can determine in a war zone who is a protected
civilian and who is a dangerous combatant?
To listen to the outpouring and public protests, you’d
be forgiven for concluding that our present populations have no memories of the
actual realities of war and – apart from the fading memoirs of a few surviving
combat veterans – they haven’t.
One of the main reasons that we have global
resolutions condemning food starvation as a weapon of war is precisely that it
was the most common consequence of conflict – and ameliorating starvation is
invariably the first priority of the aftermath of war.
From the shame of the Irish Famine to the heroics of
the Berlin airlift, food – and particularly food deprivation – is an intrinsic
weapon of conflict that has always been used to manipulate or destroy
populations. As far back as the 5th century BC, the great Chinese military
general, strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu described food as being weaponised in
war in his epic book The Art of War. Today it is estimated by UNICEF that
between 691 and 783 million people are experiencing food insecurity, with 85% of
them living in armed conflict landscapes.
As military strategists know only too well, food
starvation not only impacts the individually hungry, but tears apart
populations and infrastructures to devastating effect, with the most vulnerable
sectors of society suffering the worst. What may shock many is that this
particular war crime is often the subject of open and quite candid discussion,
and not just in war time. For free market capitalist economies, the production
and control of food sources is one of the primary tools of manipulation and population
control, whether in war or peace time. It’s the concept that food as an
entitlement (relating to wealth) that weaponises it; but it’s another kind of
concept of the entitlement to food (human justice) that ought to concern us
more.
Coming from Argentina, a country concerned mainly with
livestock farming, Pope Francis knew a thing or two about food as a means of
liberation, and also as a weapon of oppression. He quite often linked the two
contradictions – for instance, during his first visit to the World Food Program
in 2016 he noted wryly that it’s a “strange paradox” that food often cannot get
through to those suffering due to war, but weapons can.
“As a result, wars are fed, not persons. In some cases
hunger itself is used as a weapon of war,” he said.
Again in June 2016 during his regular weekly audience
in St Peter’s Square, Francis said that the Russian blockade of grain exports
from Ukraine, which millions of people depend on, especially in the poorest
countries, “is causing grave concern.”
“Please, one does not use grain, a basic food, as a
weapon in war,” he pleaded.
This was theme also picked up by our new pontiff, LEO
XIV, on Wednesday at his first General Audience. Leo said: “I renew my appeal
to allow the entry of dignified humanitarian aid and to put an end to the
hostilities whose heartbreaking price is paid by the children, elderly, and the
sick.”
The Lead Bishop for the Holy Land for the Catholic
Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales, Bishop Jim Curry, also followed
Leo’s lead and said of the Gaza situation in a statement released yesterday:
“This is a humanitarian disaster. Desperately needed aid supplies must be
allowed into Gaza to be urgently distributed to civilians. The human cost is
intolerably high with tens of thousands of weary, regularly displaced people
threatened with starvation. We need an immediate ceasefire to end
the suffering.”
Of course the tragic reality here is that there will
be no ceasefire, and no end to the suffering of the people of Gaza, until
Israel has satisfied itself that any future threat from Hamas or similar groups
has been eliminated – and everyone knows that Israel is resolute that this can
only be achieved by the complete and utter obliteration of the entire
population of the region. To this end Israel seems happy to ignore not only
international law and humanitarian pleas, but basic human, moral decency as well.
Attempting to negotiate with this absolutist position might seem frankly
futile, but if one looks back to the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, the
Israelis did actually engage in peace negotiations with the Palestinians (and
indeed other Arab countries) and significant progress was made. Peace might
even have been possible had it not been the infiltration of the Palestinian
government by Hamas, a Palestinian nationalist Sunni Islamist political
organisation with a military wing that many regard as effectively a terrorist
organisation – and looking at the abhorrent attacks of 7th October,
who could say otherwise? Certainly, from the Israeli perspective, Hamas and the
Palestinian people have become one single, destructive entity.
Closer to home, the seemingly intractable Troubles in
Northern Ireland swirled around similar ambiguities and confusions about the
relationship between extreme paramilitary organisations and a civilian
population whose sympathies could never be established. It was only when the
civilian population and the paramilitaries were finally separated that a path
to peace could be seen. One has a hope that lessons learnt from the Good Friday
Agreement might hold some hopes of a way forward in Gaza – after all, the justification
for Israel’s actions is that in the fog of war it simply cannot distinguish
between violent terrorists and starving children, and for this reason it can’t
let food and essential supplies reach anyone. That said, one might have thought
by now that the dreadful and distressing pictures coming out of Gaza would
leave little doubt in anyone’s mind that we are not seeing beleaguered
combatants begging for food, but desperate and dying civilians in need of
urgent compassion and care.
*Joseph Kelly is a catholic writer and public
theologian
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